Jupp Von Kerckerink to talk about sharks at Cary

Jupp Von Kerckerink saw his first great white shark while diving with his daughter, Phillipa, near Isla Guadaloupe in the Pacific Ocean. That was almost ten years ago, and since then sharks have become his passion. “To stand in the cage and watch those massive white sharks swimming very close in front of us was breathtaking,” he said. Since then he has made over 200 dives with sharks, 17 of them in open water with great whites. Open water means no cages, which may be why they call diving with white sharks “the Everest of shark diving.”

Von Kerckerink read everything he could find about sharks, and “the more I learned the more I thought about working to protect them.” To that end he founded the Shark Research Institute, which lobbies on their behalf and works to educate people who have very little idea about these creatures that have been around for 430 million years making them 18-20 million years older than the dinosaurs.

This is an excerpt from an article in this week's issue. For the full story please see the newspaper.